Private Investigations Page 6

  She glanced at him, that same damn innocent look in her eyes. “I’m spreading out my clothes to dry.” She finally turned to sit down, though Joe couldn’t really say he was relieved.

  He had no idea where he was going, but he figured it was good enough just to be heading away from the hotel. He hadn’t spotted anyone tailing him, but that didn’t tell him much. He didn’t trust his abilities to spot someone if they were following him.

  Minutes passed. Joe grew increasingly aware that Ripley hadn’t said anything for a while. And he suspected she was staring at him. A glance verified his suspicions.

  “What?” he asked, not sure he liked the deep furrow between her dark brows or the contemplative way she considered him.

  “What did you mean when you said that someone had to save me from myself?”

  He loosened the tie around his neck, then glanced down to find he’d never attended to the buttons she’d undone. He pulled the tie over his head and began shrugging out of his shirt. He started to protest when she reached to help. He didn’t think it was such a good idea to have her hands anywhere near him right about now. Her fingers slid down his arms, following his shirtsleeves. After she’d freed the soaked material from his body, he was left with his cotton tank top underneath. He drew in a ragged breath when she began to tug it from the waist of his slacks.

  “I asked you a question. Are you going to answer me?” she asked, the backs of her fingers grazing his stomach, robbing him of breath before she stripped the tank top off.

  Joe swallowed, catching her hands when she aimed for the zipper to his pants. “Not…a good idea.”

  She stared at him then shrugged and sat back in her seat, crossing her arms over her chest.

  Uh-oh. He got the definite impression he’d upset her.

  “I didn’t mean anything by it,” he said, inexplicably irritated that she was irritated with him.

  “I think you did,” she disagreed. “I think what you meant is that you think I’m incapable of taking care of myself.”

  He grimaced. “Well, I have to tell you, Ripley, judging from what I’ve seen so far, I’m beginning to wonder.”

  She reached for the revolver on the floor by his feet.

  “What are you doing now?”

  “Pull over,” she said.

  He looked between her and the gun. “Not until you tell me what you’re going to do.”

  She gave an exasperated sigh, which, coming from her, was almost humorous. Almost. If she hadn’t been checking her gun, it probably would have been laugh material. “I’m going to get out.”

  She slid the gun into her duffel bag, then raised onto her knees, presumably to collect her clothes from the back seat. Joe caught her leg before she could offer him a primo view of her bottom again. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.” He felt her shiver under his touch and snatched his hand back. “Your getting out, I mean. Of course.”

  “Well, it’s a good thing I didn’t ask for your opinion then, isn’t it?” she said, bending over.

  Joe briefly closed his eyes and said a little prayer, then kept his gaze steadfastly focused out the windshield and on the road beyond until she was sitting again.

  “Tell me something, Ripley. What would you do if I let you out? Where would you go?”

  She shifted on the seat. “What’s it to you?”

  He backtracked over what had happened in the past few minutes to change the atmosphere between them. He’d grown up as an only child in a house where the only person who had talked had been him. He’d had all his hopes of pursuing a sports career ripped away from him when he was nineteen. He’d gone on to build his own business from scratch and had done a damn good job of it if he did say so himself. After all that, he considered himself quite proficient at problem solving. But when it came to Ripley he drew a complete blank. “Look, that didn’t quite come out the way I intended.”

  “Oh?” she asked with a raised brow that said something along the lines of, “You could have fooled me, but I’m listening.”

  He ran his hand through his hair again, then glanced in the rearview mirror to find the red-gold strands sticking straight out at different angles. He finger combed it. “Obviously some things have happened over the past day that have given me the wrong impression about you.”

  “Obviously.”

  “I’ll be the first to admit, I don’t know very much about you. So any impression I have is superficial at best.”

  She nodded, indicating that he was going to have to find his own way out of this.

  He blew out a long breath. “What I propose is this,” he said. The road he was on was about to dead end near the Mississippi River. He flicked on the left blinker, deciding to drive around until one or the other of them figured out what in hell they were going to do from there…if he talked her into staying in the car. “We go back to square one and start over from scratch.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “How do you mean?”

  He slid his gaze over her, then he offered a grin along with his right hand. “Hi. My name’s Joe Pruitt, creator and owner of Sole Survivor, Inc. Nice to meet you.”

  She stared at his hand, then warily put her hand inside it and gave a brief squeeze. He was astounded by how slender her fingers were, how delicate, but forced himself not to let on to his reaction, reminding himself that she knew how to handle a gun.

  Then she smiled, the brightness of it, the guilelessness, hitting him both above and below the belt. “Ripley Logan, private investigator,” she said, taking her hand back.

  Joe stared unblinkingly at the road. Okay, that was easy enough. But since making her angry had been equally effortless, he figured he’d better watch his step from here on out.

  Only now that he wasn’t preoccupied with the source of her anger and his irrational desire to keep her in his car, he questioned both at length.

  The FBI was looking for her, for crying out loud. And they were probably now looking for him.

  It was impossible to believe that just last night he lay in his hotel room bed alone, wishing something would happen to liven up his life. Had he known this was what lay ahead, he would have thought twice about the careless desire—would have nixed it altogether.

  “So, Ripley Logan, private investigator. What did you do before you became a P.I.?”

  Her smile disappeared, and she turned her head toward the window, away from him. “I was a secretary.”

  Joe nearly choked.

  She glared at him, then said, “Up until two weeks ago.”

  “Don’t tell me. You just up and quit your job one day and hung out your P.I. shingle.”

  She made a face. “I knew this wouldn’t work.”

  “What?” he asked, trying not to sound too judgmental. “I’m just trying to make conversation.”

  “No, what you’re doing is making me sound like an idiot.”

  He grimaced. She fell silent again.

  “You didn’t ask what I used to do,” he said quietly.

  She blinked at him.

  “Before I got into sports shoe designing.”

  Wariness entered her eyes, but she apparently decided to humor him. She cleared her throat. “So, Joe Pruitt, what did you do before you became a shoe salesman?”

  “I played sports.”

  Her gaze dropped to his chest. “Nice.”

  He wasn’t sure if she was commenting on his answer or his chest, so he cleared his throat. “I was working toward signing with the pros when my knee imploded.”

  Her gaze shifted to his face. “Which sport?”

  “Basketball.”

  She nodded, as if that was what she’d guessed.

  He shifted in the seat, wondering why he’d offered that information. Not many women asked about what he’d done before. Ripley hadn’t, either. It was that he’d offered it that surprised him.

  “I thought I saw a scar last night,” she said, reaching out to rest her left hand on his right knee.

  Talk about your knee-jerk react
ions. She took her hand back, and he tried to laugh off the violent twitch of his leg.

  He stretched his neck. Not many commented on that, either. His scar. It ran up the inside of his kneecap, a whopping eight inches long and a quarter inch wide. Even now when he looked at it, he was almost surprised to find it there. The doctors had told him he was lucky to be walking on the knee. Of course that hadn’t meant a whole lot to him at the time, not when his entire life had revolved around sports.

  “That must have been hard on you,” Ripley said quietly. “Having your dreams ripped out from under you like that.”

  “Yeah, it pretty much sucked.”

  She sat and quietly contemplated him for a long moment. “It looks like you’re doing all right for yourself, though. Not everyone can do that, you know. Recover from such a blow. I have a cousin in St. Louis, twice removed on my mother’s side, who got into a car accident the night before final negotiations with the Cardinals. He pretty much exists on welfare, beer and Springsteen. Not a pretty picture.”

  Joe looked at her, really looked at her, hearing what she was saying and what lay behind her words. “I don’t suppose being a secretary was your dream when you were a little girl.”

  Her smile nearly swallowed her face. “No.”

  “So was Nancy Drew your heroine?”

  She stared blankly at him for a moment, then finally shook her head. “Not exactly. I’m a computer programmer by training.” She shifted slightly away from him. “Turn left here.”

  He got the distinct impression that she wasn’t going to offer any more. “Why should I turn here?”

  She smiled at him, but her expression was determined. “If you’re going to question everything I ask, Joe, then you might as well pull over and let me out now. Because this isn’t going to work.”

  “What? Don’t you think I have a right to know where we’re going? Or would you like me to put a blindfold on?”

  Her eyes darkened as her gaze flicked slowly, suggestively over his face. “That’s a thought.”

  Indeed, it was. Only he didn’t want to be behind the wheel of a car when it happened. He’d prefer to be in a bed with his hands tied to the posts and Ripley straddling him.

  “We’re going to check the pawnshop I went to yesterday. The woman I’m looking for…she sold the guy a couple of items the day before yesterday.”

  “And you think she’ll come back?”

  She nodded.

  “Why?”

  Her gaze snapped up.

  “Sorry,” he said, raising his hands. “Just please tell me it’s not women’s intuition.”

  She smiled. “It’s women’s intuition.”

  He groaned.

  She laughed. “She told the owner she might return today to sell him a couple more items.”

  He glared at her.

  “Gotcha.”

  That, she did, indeed. Have him. Right by the short hairs. The problem was, he wasn’t in a hurry for her to let them go, no matter how painful the experience was proving to be.

  She directed him to turn right at another corner a couple of blocks up. It was an area around Beale Street, not as well kept as the infamous street and in need of some tender loving care it probably wasn’t going to get anytime soon. A group of black men on a corner stopped talking and turned to watch them drive by. Ripley told him to slow down on the next block.

  “Oh, boy,” she muttered.

  But before Joe could ask her what was wrong, she was burying her head in the crotch of his slacks.

  5

  “I’D ASK WHAT you’re doing down there,” Ripley heard Joe say as she burrowed her head into his lap. “But I’m afraid you’ll stop doing whatever you have in mind if I do.”

  Ripley rolled her eyes. “Car at noon. Dark four-door sedan. Anyone look familiar to you?”

  She didn’t hear anything for a long moment, then Joe’s car sped up to what she guessed was the speed limit.

  “Damn,” Joe said, then repeated the word a couple of times for good measure, his thighs growing tense under her cheek.

  Ripley tried to ignore the heat radiating through his damp slacks, and the fact that a certain part of his anatomy was mere millimeters away from her mouth. She swallowed hard. “Is it safe to come up?”

  “What?” Joe sounded distracted, then sighed. “Yes. Seeing as the reason you’re down there isn’t the one I hoped.”

  Ripley sat up in the passenger seat and smoothed her hair from her face, her heart hiccupping. They were two blocks from the pawnshop. Directly across the street sat a dark sedan not all that dissimilar to Joe’s. She watched as one of the World Wrestling Federation wannabes got out of the back of the car, looked both ways, then crossed to the pawnshop. She twisted her lips.

  “How in the hell did they beat us here?” Joe asked, though Ripley was pretty sure it was a rhetorical question, since there was no way she could know the answer.

  “If you hadn’t stopped in the parking lot back there to protect my modesty, they wouldn’t have,” she said.

  He stared at her.

  She shrugged. “What? It’s the truth. It looks like they just got here, which means they beat us by a couple of minutes.”

  He grimaced. “Yeah, well, if I hadn’t stopped, they would have caught you inside the shop.” He rubbed his chin. “Besides, given the reason for my stopping, I probably would have gotten into an accident had I continued on, anyway. Then where would we be?”

  Ripley couldn’t help but smile. His reaction to her changing in front of him had been humorous, yes, but in some strange way, it had also been touching. It wasn’t so much that he was trying to save her honor or something equally chivalrous. No, she suspected that one very stuffy Joe Pruitt had wanted to keep anyone else from gazing at her the same way he apparently enjoyed doing.

  She turned to stare out the window. Joe had driven toward the Mississippi. The muddy brown water sparkled in the midday sun as a barge, choked with different-colored containers sluggishly made its way toward the gulf.

  She couldn’t put her finger on it, but for some reason she seemed to be tuned into the same channel Joe was. She instinctively knew when he was looking at her. And it didn’t take a woman more experienced than she was to know what he had in mind when he was looking at her. She seemed aware of him on every level. Knew when he thought she was completely nuts…and when he wanted her so bad it made her ache.

  She glanced at him. At the way his blond hair lay tousled against his forehead, giving him a sexy, boyish look. His bare chest was broad and toned and made her mouth water with the desire to drag her tongue across his skin for a forbidden taste. Which, of course, was the completely last thing she should be thinking right now.

  “Something’s going on here I don’t know about,” she said to herself, reaching for her duffel. She took out the crumpled file and smoothed it against her legs before opening it.

  “Where should I go?” Joe asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I can’t exactly keep driving without a destination.”

  She hadn’t thought of that.

  In fact, it appeared she was incapable of thinking about a lot when she was around Joe. She wondered if that’s the way it worked with couples. You had to set aside a part of your brain to devote solely to them—for the consideration of the other person’s feelings, thoughts, intentions—leaving you less equipped to do things the way you normally would.

  Of course, she and Joe weren’t a couple. He was just some poor innocent fool who’d gotten into trouble because of her. That he looked anything but an innocent wasn’t his fault.

  “I don’t know,” she said softly.

  His jaw tensed at her words.

  She closed the file. “Look, Joe, I’ve already told you that you don’t have to do this. If you want the truth, I don’t seem to function all that well around you, anyway.”

  He glanced at her, a skeptical glint in his blue eyes.

  “And I don’t want to get you into any
more trouble than I already have. Whatever that trouble is.” She sighed and squeezed the file against her chest. “I think it would be better for both of us if you just took me back to the hotel and dropped me off. I’ll get my rental car and…”

  “And?” he prompted.

  “And what?”

  “What do you do from there?”

  She shrugged. “I’ll figure something out. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the answer came to me the instant you’re out of the picture.”

  His lips twitched upward in the beginnings of a smile.

  “What?” she asked, inexplicably irritated all over again.

  “So you don’t function well when I’m around, huh?”

  She looked away and waved her hand. “You…mess with my mental wiring, or something.”

  “Hmm. Or something.”

  She shifted until her leg was bent against the seat and she was facing him more fully. “What would you suggest it is?”

  “Simple,” he said, the smile a stomach-tickling grin. “You want me. Bad.”

  Her laugh was spontaneous, but a tension resonated through her, making it sound husky and sexy.

  He looked in the rearview mirror then changed lanes to go into the city. “I have a suggestion if you’d like to hear it.”

  “Does it include me naked and a bed?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Then I don’t want to hear it.”

  He gave a mock frown. “Okay, then, it doesn’t involve either.” He glanced at her. “For now.”

  The promise in his voice sent shivers skittering all over her. She didn’t say anything for a moment. Then she said, “Tell me.”

  “Well, since we’ve already established that we’re in this together for as long as it takes you to find your missing person—”

  “Nicole Bennett.”

  “Yeah, this Bennett person, I suggest we stop at the next diner and have some lunch.”

  “And this helps us find Nicole how, exactly?”

  “It doesn’t. It stops the growling in my stomach.” He glanced at her. “And gives me a chance to call my secretary in Minneapolis and have her make reservations for us at another hotel. Under another name. Nothing that can lead the FBI—”